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Iris Bahr in her production Dai |
Life in the war zone: exploring the threat of suicide bombers
DAI
Shaw Theatre
IT is moments before the bomb explodes. The café is packed and its customers, who are soon to become victims of a suicide attack, are unaware of their fate.
Not the subject for a light-hearted play, but this is the challenge writer and actor Iris Bahr has set herself in her show, Dai (enough), which starts at the Shaw Theatre this week.
Iris, who wrote and performs the one-woman piece, has attempted to encapsulate what it feels like to be a civilian in a society which is permanently at war.
“Most people have no idea just what it is like to live in place under threat from random attack, to live in a society where you may be blown up any day,” she says.
“It is the same for the people who live in Gaza. What is it like to be with a friend one minute, and then the next moment they are gone?”
She speaks of the conflict from personal experience. Born in New York, she moved to Israel as a 12-year-old after her mother and father split up.
She was conscripted into the army – her unit had something to do with military intelligence, and no, she doesn’t like to talk about it. But what it did do was help her collect her views on the futility of conflict, and this play is the product of her experiences.
Her route into acting came in a roundabout way. She was studying neuro-psychology at Brown University in Rhode Island when she was hit by a truck and badly injured. As she recovered, she took stock of her life and decided to pursue her love of writing and acting as a serious career. And it got her far: she had a role in the seminal New York twentysomething comedy Friends, and has appeared in various other hit TV shows and films.
The run is part of a tour that has taken her show across America, to Tel Aviv, Italy and Edinburgh.
She has been fascinated to see how different audiences have reacted to her portrayals of the disparate café customers, which includes a young American in the Israeli army, a stuck-up Israeli expatriate who lives in a swanky Manhattan apartment, a Palestinian academic, an American actress and a militant West Bank Jewish settler.
“Different communities understand different parts of the show,” she admits. “In Edinburgh, they laughed at everything and really got the nuances of the humour. It has not been like that every where.”
Perhaps the most nerve-wracking experience she has had to date was facing an audience in Israel. “I was very nervous before hand but I was well-received – they were able to laugh at themselves,” she says. “It was not what people expected, as it is entertaining. It is how people live in Israel, how they deal with the pressures the society is under.”
She hopes her show will bring a greater understanding not of what it means to be an Israeli or Palestinian living in a conflict zone, but what it means to be a human living in these strained circumstances.
“I wanted to write a piece about this splintered existence I had experienced, about my own conflicting ideas and opinions. I think at times Israel is grossly misunderstood on a personal level, and I wanted to explain that,” she says.
Although laced with caustic humour, this play is serious, political and personal.
“It is really how people from different backgrounds look at Israel, and find common ground in unlikely places,” she says.
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